Meta

musings of a twenty-first century stoic

ISHIZENO i8 redesign

It has been a month since we have decided to redesign the ISHIZENO i8 based on the generous feedback that we received from a highly-respected modular synth designer. Today, some of this redesign is coming together (Cf. updated website).

First and foremost, the Arduinos are gone. This will allow us to dramatically simplify our design, while providing more analog ports per channel, support for 12V on analog ports, and better isolation between analog and digital signals.

Second, we have decided to focus the synthesizer on two main features: crosspoint switching and polyphony. Everything else is secondary and should be ignored. In a nutshell, we are building a switching matrix with 8 modular bays that can be used to create a polyphonic synthesizer with a very small form factor.

Third, we will do everything we can to provide more ports per channel. This might require that we reduce the number of polyphonic channels from 8 to 4, or that we reduce the number of dedicated knobs per channel from 6 to 4, using soft knobs whenever more potentiometers are needed for a given channel.